To
survey the
list of authors whose texts are contained on this new CD database is to
recognize afresh the variety and richness of the Celtic, esp. the Irish,
contribution to medieval Latinity and, lingering to this day, its
marginalization. This CD grants access while in a curious way still
reinforcing marginalization.

The disk embraces a striking diversity
of writers (for there are few bulky corpora here) from Patrick to Geraldus
Cambrensis. Of particular value and interest are the numerous lives of
saints: Irish hagiography has been a rich subject of interest throughout
this century, recently heightened by the publication of Richard Sharpe's
Medieval Irish Saints' Lives (1991). In total number of titles,
approximately 40% of what is here (counting from the list supplied) are
anonymous or insecurely-attributed works, including liturgical texts,
church canons, penitential rules, and charters of princelings. There is no
true "canon" here, though there are a few major figures (Patrick,
Columbanus, Eriugena -- but it is not clear why the first two books of his
Periphyseon are missing), and indeed it is one of the strengths of
Celtic Latinity that it comes with no predigested canon of authors, but
rather a canon of saints, long since called into question. The
"author" died a long time ago in this field, with anonymity, pseudonymity,
and polyonymity almost the rule rather than the exception. Since Sharpe
and Michael Lapidge published their Bibliography of Celtic-Latin
Literature, 400-1200 in 1985 and with the ongoing publication of the
journal Peritia from 1984, the field has come of age.

This
CD began as part of a larger dictionary project sponsored by the Royal
Irish Academy. The decision to make the corpus of texts available is an
important and praiseworthy one. The format here will be familiar to anyone
who has used the CETEDOC CD of patristic Latin texts: same publisher, same
software. The differences are few and fairly transparent. First, the
collection of data has gone on over a long period using various
technologies. Much of what is here is still in a primitive form using all
capital letters (and asterisks to mark "real" capitalization). Second, an
unusually candid discussion in the accompanying manual makes it clear that
the accuracy of texts across the database is variable, and anecdotal usage
turns up a higher percentage of typographical errors than are in the
CETEDOC data base.

As with CETEDOC, this is not meant as a
definitive artifact: it is the "First (Preliminary) CD-ROM Edition" and a
total of three editions are promised. One difficulty with this approach is
that, though upgrades are provided at costs substantially below that of
the first purchase, it is still difficult to know how expensive the whole
thing will be when finished. When the original is published in this truly
preliminary stage, more users will notice and object to the
pricing.

The CD is remarkably easy to install and the instructions
are fairly transparent. I have not seen anyone have trouble doing a
rudimentary search on first acquaintance with the disk, though more
complicated searches are (as is often the case) somewhat challenging
purely from the software point of view; doing intelligent searches from
the point of view of content and using the material wisely is another
matter. (The CETEDOC manual has an intelligent few pages of advice on that
score, lacking in the manual here.) But any student of the field will
immediately feel that she has been turned loose in a familiar but enriched
playground of authors and texts, many of them hard to locate or published
only in large corpora. Simply for ownership of this much text, the
purchase price is a bargain. (I do not know of anyone who has successfully
gotten this or the CETEDOC disk to run on a Macintosh system where
essentially you need a DOS-emulator program like "SoftPC". Under Windows,
it can also be a bit buggy and for safety's sake, I usually leave Windows
and run it under old DOS. It will be necessary for later versions to be
upgraded appropriately.)

There are some further drawbacks to the
Brepols CD's, however. Chief among them is a nervous fear of downloading.
It is not possible to extract from one of their disks a complete text of
anything unless you are both quite clever and willing to endure
almost hopeless tedium -- at any rate, the ordinary user will not be able
to do so. The text can then be read consecutively on-screen in the
software supplied, but not cut/pasted or quoted extensively elsewhere. (A
download feature will let you take away selected citations from search
results, but the output format is often quarrelsome when it encounters a
standard word processor.)

Finally, the most notable handicap is
the inability to search for a specific citation. If you are told that
Eriugena says something striking at Periphyseon 3.43 but are not
given specific Latin words to search for, you cannot find it easily here
and you are left browsing the whole of the third book. This is true of
both ACLL and CETEDOC and a major handicap; but the information is already
in the database, for search results that hit upon Periph. 3.43
will tell you that information. This requires a readjustment of the search
software and should be an urgent priority with Brepols. By comparison to
that painful lack, the want of an apparatus criticus and (urgent for
Christian Latin texts) an apparatus scripturisticus is only a nagging
ache.

I said at the outset that the project managed to
remarginalize Celtic Latin. Though it is quite clear that with this disk,
the interested searcher the world over has new power to control this body
of literature, the production of a separate CD is what re-ghettoizes the
subject. Given that Brepols is publishing the CETEDOC disk with at last
count well over 20 million words of Christian Latin, it would surely make
more sense for the ACLL to be incorporated in the one larger database than
kept separate here. I have and use both databases and find it irksome to
have one question about Latinity and need to swap disks in a CD
drive to get there. There may come a point at which the expansion of the
two databases would require CETEDOC to think of a two-disk format, but (1)
disk capacity will probably grow faster than text can be input, and (2)
the obsolescence of CD as anything other than a transportation medium will
impinge on us all soon enough. (I have already begun transferring a couple
of crucial CD's to my new vast hard disk, forasmuch as they can be
searched at much higher speeds. CETEDOC and ACLL are set up in
such a way as to discourage this, another mild drawback.) Eriugena, e.g.,
and Geraldus Cambrensis clearly belong in the CETEDOC database as
well as ACLL and it would be far more efficient to introduce "Celtic" as a
tool for limiting searches on an expanded CETEDOC disk than to require it
be treated as a separate category. When that reunification takes place,
Hiberno-Latinists can begin afresh the task of luring colleagues who
customarily work in continental settings to take this remarkable material
seriously.